ANTI-PROS IN THE MENTAWAIS

Without the anti-pro there would be no surf magazines, no corporate dollars flowing in, no consumers to sell to. In short, there would be no market place for surfing’s corporate bourgeois class, represented by pro surfers such as Kelly Slater, Rob Machado and the aptly named Ben Bourgeois.

The anti-pro represents surfing’s salt-of-the earth. You, my friend, are the anti-pro. Since anti-pros are so abundant, why then, are there no stories about you? Oh sure, occasionally a fluffy 400-word department piece will shed some light on the anti-pro, but by and large you are ignored. Instead you get “pros” on a boat trip: bourgeois class, all-expense-paid, photo hounds whose concept of cultural awareness is reflected solely in their knowledge that North American DVDs don’t play in Asian VCD players. But the photo pros rip. And therefore they help create, in a big way, stunning imagery. Most of us can’t make 3-foot Pismo pier look too good. Tim Curran can. However, level the playing field a bit by throwing a few anti-pros into Mentawai perfection, and the result can be worthy imagery, and a tale that connects with us, the everyday, hardcore, checkin’-it-at-dawn, working-class surfer. Or at least, that was my plan.

So I set out to demonstrate that a few 40-something anti-pros on a boat trip–many who wouldn’t be able to muster up the nerve to caddy at Sunset Beach let alone paddle out–could, in fact, be characters in a worthy tale. And in a surf mag, a worthy tale consists of good images–the rest (text) is filler.
—Scott Bass